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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • From a technical level you should use something lossless in this situation, but it really quickly becomes impractical. Actually lossless 1080p60 is going to be something like 500mbps, so if you’re playing for an hour I hope you have a spare 2tb drive laying around. The artifacts in really high bitrate compressed video are so minimal that they basically don’t matter. Often codecs do noise removal first thing so whatever minor artifacts still exist will get smeared over by that anyway.

    Also when you are testing make sure there’s some movement in the video. AV1 especially has modes for presentations and things that basically make a PowerPoint, so sizes might be unrealistic if you’re just recording your desktop. I don’t think that gets enabled in handbrake but it’s been a while since I looked.


  • If you’re seeing any artifacts in the original video, you probably need to re-record in a higher bitrate. It needs to look identical to uncompressed. Your later encodes will be trying to encode all the artifacts in the original video, which could be why the file sizes keep getting bigger - you’re giving it noisier video than the original.

    50mbps for recording as an intermediate like that is well within the realm of normal. You can try having obs record in 264 with a quality setting instead of a bitrate setting, which can save space when things are more static - something like cq 6 or lower can do pretty well.

    Unfortunately, yeah finding the sweet spot does take forever. One thing I would recommend is once you have an idea where you want to land, try a few much longer videos and see what the differences are. Slower paced sections might compress much better than the fast action stuff in one codec or another. Again it’s all kind of a balancing act on where you want to be.




  • Because it’s just for personal archival, I would recommend recording in super high bitrate 264 or 265 depending on what your card can do in real time, then compressing that file later using either av1 or 265, depending on which works better for the content.

    If you’re playing in 1440p165, then you should record that to start although if it’s an option I would play and record at 1080p120. 1440 is a bit of an odd duck resolution that some stuff doesn’t really like, but it’s getting better all the time so it’s not a huge deal. More important is 120fps because if you decide to go down to 60 or even 30fps they split evenly, which is important since it means the extra frames just get thrown out. There’s no 82.5 frame so it either has to blend two together or pick one that’s at the wrong time, and neither looks good.

    Record in OBS using like, 25-40mbps in whatever your graphics card can do realtime, with all the audio tracks in something lossless like FLAC. High enough it might as well be uncompressed.

    Once you have your gameplay recording from OBS, use either Handbrake or FFMPEG to convert it to your long term storage format. Since this is such a big project I would make some samples using cheats to get an idea what the bullet-hell-iest parts will look like, then try a few different handbrake or ffmpeg settings, and see what gives you the tradeoff of file size and quality that you like. It’ll also give you a ballpark idea about how much long term storage you’ll need.

    Non-realtime encoding like ffmpeg and Handbrake is much more efficient than realtime done by your graphics card, like on the order of like half the file size for the same quality - that’s why you want the two step process. It also allows you to play in 120fps for that responsiveness, but watch at 60 or even 30fps to save some file size.

    When you set up handbrake, you’ll have a few settings to play with and make samples from - encoder, quality level, speed, fps, and rescaling.

    Encoder is probably the most important. Use either x265 or SVT-AV1. In my experience, they’re close in terms of efficiency, but AV1 pulls ahead in certain situations. AV1 is more efficient about large static sections and when it breaks up it just looks blurry. 265 is better at retaining texture, but when it fails its gross digital blocks. 265 is faster than AV1, but when you push AV1 and it takes 1000 years it does a better job. Basically, run a lot of tests and then decide.

    Scaling is where you go from 1440 to 1080 and is probably the least important for file size. I honestly wouldn’t bother with it, but you can try. Like I said, technically some TVs don’t like 1440, and everything supports 1080, but I wouldn’t worry about it too much.

    FPS I have the least experience with. My guess is that going do something lower is going to save you some size, but its really going to depend on the codec and the content.

    Quality level is the most important setting - just set it to what you think is watchable. It doesn’t use a bitrate, it adjusts the bitrate to get a constant quality level, so it’s much more efficient. It’s important to note that they aren’t exactly the same at every speed setting, so be careful.

    Lastly is the speed. 265 goes from very fast to very slow, and AV1 goes from 9 (fast) to 0 (stupid slow). Personally I use slow or very slow for 265 and about 4 for AV1, but if you have a lot of video to crunch through you might want to crank that up a bit.

    For audio use OPUS. 96 is the default “bitrate” and I find it to be enough. Some players don’t like it but if you’re thinking about using AV1, anything that would support AV1 supports opus.

    The main thing will just be doing a bunch of video encode samples and finding the settings and workflow that’s right for you.



  • After having to fly United a bunch of times this summer, they changed the names of the tickets and invented a new “no one wants that” tier.

    There’s now standard economy which is what everyone’s used to and gives you a “personal item” (i.e. a backpack or a purse) and a “carry on item”, and basic economy which only includes the personal item. They mention it on their website, but on third party websites its not quite as obvious which ticket you’re getting.

    It has been a nightmare - on every single flight there’s a crowd of people pissed that they aren’t allowed a carry on with their ticket, with them having to run halfway across the airport to upgrade their tickets or pay 3x as much for a bag they thought was included.

    If you’re being charitable, it’s a roundabout discount on checked bags to fix the problem they invented by charging for checked bags and then sucking at handling them. Every single flight I took had them asking for people to check their carry on for free because the bins were going to be overloaded, and it seems like they want to incentivize actually checking a bag again.

    I started instantly asking them to gate check my carry on (for free) because honestly, the airport experience is way nicer when you don’t have to deal with your luggage all the time. If you check 1 bag as a couple you might even save money, and if you’re alone it might be worth the difference to not have to worry about only having two pairs of pants on your three week trip.

    More realistically they want to normalize having to pay for carry on the same way they did checked bags, and they are trying to sneak around that by starting with only their new BS economy tier. Wouldn’t surprise me if they got rid of “basic” and just made carry on a “business class” or whatever amenity.



  • The way I’ve been thinking about would be to have the “meta community” be a separate thing from each individual community. Each individual community would opt in to joining, and would retain their own moderation and users, but the posts would be sort of cross posted to the meta community. The meta community mods largely just deal with removing posts that don’t fit. All the comments go on the original instance of the post and are moderated there, so the meta community mods might be allowed to moderate those comments on an opt in basis.

    The idea is that it’s for very similar communities across different instances, but because it’s opt in there are probably other uses. The hope would be that each individual community could retain their vibe, while the meta community would have more of a firehose of content, and possibly filter some of those topics back down for more in depth discussion.

    I’d also love for individual users to be able to group communities for themselves, and for those to be shareable, which seems much quicker to implement.



  • Oh no not this again. These articles pop up all the time and they’re kind of awful when put in context - like yeah solar panels aren’t perfect, but they’re pretty dang close honestly. It’s great that they mention the stuff at the end about laser welding, but the rest of the article is kind of just fear mongering.

    Firstly, panels don’t really go bad - the article mentions this. But that doesn’t mean they have to be thrown away. Yeah, it makes sense to put 300w/m² panels on your solar farm and replace your old 200w/m² panels. But those old panels are generally still producing power, and can be sold as used for projects less focused on absolute peak efficiency. The old three Rs tell us, Reuse is generally better than Recycle.

    Secondly, panels don’t randomly leech heavy metals. They sometimes have lead based solder, and contain small amounts of cadmium. If the panel is in tact in a pile or deployed it’s all locked up within the panel and doesn’t just jump out. It can leech out if you put ground up panels in an acidic landfill that leeches into the ground water - that’s bad so we shouldn’t do that, but we already don’t and have even more regulation coming.

    Panels are mostly glass and aluminum by weight, they’re not like 20% lead or anything crazy. Recycling them safely is not some kind of crazy future tech, just a matter of regulation and economics.

    Moreover, the amounts they contain are miniscule compared to what fossil fuels produce. As Nickelback says, look at this graph: graph showing oil based energy producing like 40 times more cadmium.

    from here

    Or this North Carolina paper:

    Every GWh of electricity generated by burning coal produces about 4 grams ofcadmium air emissions.21 Even though North Carolina produces a significant fraction of our electricity from coal, electricity from solar offsets much more natural gas than coal due to natural gas plants being able to adjust their rate of production more easily and quickly. If solar electricity offsets 90% natural gas and 10% coal, each 5-megawatt (5 MWAC, which is generally 7 MWDC) CdTe solar facility in North Carolina keeps about 157 grams, or about a third of a pound, of cadmium out of ourenvironment.

    from here

    And as far as total landfill waste its dwarfed by what fossil fuels produce, even just general consumer trash:

    from this paper via this blog

    For most panels it seems like the most polluting thing about them is that they are produced using our current grid and not other solar panels.









  • aren’t you still limited by ambient air temp because the hot side of the Peltier needs to be cooled by air anyway?

    No, that’s why the baby fridge works. The peltier TEC in the fridge can produce temperatures below ambient, but generally not below freezing. Computer chip TEC coolers would go farther and push more power through the TEC and do things like water-cooling the hot side instead of a little fan.

    The reason they don’t get used anymore more complicated. It’s my understanding that basically TECs have a sort of limit on the amount of heat they can push from the cold side to the hot side, because moving more heat means more energy used and thus more waste heat. Apparently most modern chips are past that limit. IIRC, TECs can only move something like 100w of heat - past that and they start to heat themselves up because of waste heat. Modern chips can be like 300w.

    Sub ambient cooling also comes with a bunch of issues like condensation, so no one really uses it day to day. Also, chips are run so close to their limits now that cooling like that doesn’t get you nearly the performance difference it once did.


  • The light is immaterial (lol) to the holograms existence. They are only solid via fancy forcefield transmitted from the holo emitters. For all intents and purposes they seem to only exist as programs within whatever computer operates the holo emitters, whatever or whatever that may be. The only limit on where they can be is the speed of the computer system and links within it. They can send holo programs between the alpha and delta quadrants, but are limited by the speed and this can only send smaller programs. The mobile emitter often gets transported, but that’s because they only have one. If the doctor is going somewhere with holo emitters they don’t need to be transported and can just be data transferred.

    Personal rant follows:

    !The whole hologram plot in Voyager is honestly poorly thought out, and it basically feels like if you followed their logic Chat GPT would be a protected federation citizen. I get that the writers wanted to give the doctor legitimized personhood, but it feels like they forgot to think about what that would mean for literally every other hologram. !<

    !Like, they give that one species holograms to hunt, does that mean they invented a species doomed to be reincarnated as prey forever? Is, Moriarty sentient, and if so is trapping him in a simulation moral? If they just run a hologram long enough does it gain sentience? How are they testing for this? Does that mean Vic Fontane is sentient even though he probably would say he isn’t? What about that weird Irish bartender Janeway does - fair haven ran for a while, how long does it take? If you run a training program are you committing infanticide? Is turning off a hologram even moral?!<